A 50-year-old Japanese man being watched after treatment for testicular seminoma turned up with a low-attenuation spot near the surface of segment 7 of his liver on a routine contrast-enhanced CT scan. The obvious worry was that his cancer had spread. Surgeons performed a laparoscopic partial hepatectomy, and the specimen contained no tumor at all. It contained a worm.
What separates this case from the small handful of similar ones already in the literature is not the parasite. It is the trail the parasite left behind. Writing in the journal Parasitology International, a team led by Hiroki Takahashi reported a continuous linear band of granulation tissue running from the outer surface of the liver directly to the lesion, which the authors say confirms the route the Anisakis larva took into the organ.
